Water Supply and Sanitation Policy in Developing Countries Part 2 is our second MOOC in a two-part sequence, and looks at ‘Developing Effective Interventions’. Here we invite you to develop analytical skills and deep understanding about a complex, controversial policy problem – one with no simple, easy answers. About half a billion people on our planet still lack access to improved water supplies and about two billion do not have improved sanitation services, leading to an unknown but very large number of avoidable deaths each year from water-related diseases. Millions of dollars are spent on avoidable health care expenditures, and people – mostly women – spend many billions of hours carrying water from sources outside the home. Reducing these costs is a major global challenge for us all in the 21st century. Join us to explore the challenging and complex political, economic, social, and technical dimensions of the policy interventions that donors, national governments and water utilities use to address this challenge. This second MOOC consists of the following seven sessions:
• Session 1: Introduction and how our ‘ancient instincts’ affect water policy interventions.
• Session 2: Planning better policy interventions: Roles, features and examples of planning protocols.
• Session 3: Water pricing, tariff design and subsidies.
• Session 4: Providing information to households and communities to improve water and sanitation conditions.
• Session 5: Changing the institutions that deliver water and sanitation services: Privatization in developing countries.
• Session 6: Changing institutions: Lessons from the UK water privatization story.
• Session 7: Changing institutions: Improving regulation of the water and sanitation sector.
Your instructors for this course have worked in and studied this sector for many years. Professor Dale Whittington has worked on water and sanitation policy and planning issues for over 40 years in more than two dozen low and middle-income countries. Dr Duncan Thomas has worked in the UK and European water sectors for 15 years, focusing on overcoming barriers to technological, organizational, regulatory and policy innovations.
Please watch this introductory video outlining the course: https://youtu.be/KkBmo3EKkkI

教学方

Dr Duncan Thomas

Lecturer

Prof Dale Whittington

Professor

脚本

So Tony, one of the aspects that may have helped to make the virtual water concept have more impact, in a general sense, is this water footprinting measurement. How did you come to be involved with that? Was that something you sort of led, or was it something someone else led? >> No, [COUGH] it was a conscious decision by Aaron Hoekstra, who was a professor in Delft at the time. He's now in ENSCONET but still a leading figure in autometrics, an engineer, a modeler who had shown science because his PhD had quite a lot of soft science in it as well as the hydrology. He spotted this virtual water idea. And by chance, green water blue water was coming about the same time in the late 80s. And footprinting was also getting going through the late 80s and then through the 90s. And [COUGH] so it was quite natural that someone that had the skills to do water footprinting as opposed to other sorts of environmental footprinting should pick it up. And there was a center there doing modeling and he was a recognized modeler. I am just, I'm astonished that modelers have the courage to make the assumptions they do. And then in this case, there's such an appetite. This is my main experience. There's such an appetite amongst executives of corporations and politicians and scientists for metrics. I mean, some of them believe that if you can't put metrics on a problem or issue, it's not an issue. I mean, if you can't have the numbers. I mean, McNamara at the World Bank, for ten years as President in the 60s. He had this reputation, and I saw him do it once at a water meeting, saying give me the numbers, give me the numbers. And of course, [LAUGH] the poor people, they're all scientists. And of course, and as soon as they show hesitation [COUGH] in finding numbers, then they're destroyed. Because they can't have solid numbers which they can speak fluent pros about, they're destructible people. But I noticed that, because there were numbers, and Aaron is very professional. If you look at the water site for water footprinting, it's a very, very wonderful thing. All of the stuff that he's done in the 17 years since then, it's a triumph of information and responsible modelling. [COUGH] But I found that, I was at one or two meetings over the next five, seven years, and we often got into this position, especially in Spain at a couple of meetings. Spain is an interesting place because Spain has got big water problems like California. And it's got an awful lot of hydraulic engineers and a long tradition of building dams and solving things with concrete and so on. And then in that same period, so 2002 through to 2007, there's a very good group in Madrid of economists and engineers, hydrogeologist David. And Spain has decent data, and so they they came up with much more interesting data than Aaron did. Because [LAUGH] the amazing thing is that Aaron's work was done not with a big post docs and big rich funding. It was done by [LAUGH] a couple of PhD students and and three or four master's students. He had an amazing capacity to get results out of this set of inputs. So, and I remember I also went to a meeting in Frankfurt at one point and we were being pressed about the political side. And I remember him sharing very clearly in the Frankfurt meeting that no, the numbers were not necessarily relevant to policy. But then he was overtaken, in my view. You can see I respect him highly, I'm not being critical. But he was overtaken by the private sector. because the public sector wanted to have some feel of this, and the U.K. government definitely put something into it. But the vast majority of the interest came from the corporate sector. sort of the big battalions like Unilever, where they said, well, what we need is life-cycle analysis. [LAUGH] So they got a few life-cycles people from, I think URS, the consulting company. And they looked at all their products and did life-cycle analysis with respect to water on all of them. And I discovered recently that they do it every two years, because I did ask them in the late sort of 2009, 10 period, how often do you do this? We've done it once, it's so expensive we can't. But they must have been persuaded to do it every couple of years. They did it in a defensive mode because they didn't want to have, numbers that could damage them were very important. So it was the risk of reputation which was important. So, but they then have done so much work that's compared with the wonderful master's students and wonderful research students [LAUGH] and ENSCONET and maybe. Then he's kept that going with that sort of research. This must have cost a 100,000 times more [LAUGH] than his if you took it together. But it all resides inside Coca-Cola, inside Pepsi, or inside Unilever. So I've, over the recent years, realized that the private sector has pulled way ahead, but they don't share. But as I've said earlier in these conversations, they only handle 1% of the water. But it's as if they're really big water managers. They very quickly realized when they started to look at their water footprints in their business that the vast majority was outside the fence of their, it was done there on the farms. And they recognized that, and they've been certain things about it by investing in farming into some extent. But the amount of money being spent is very small. And at least one company, the money doesn't come from the operational budget, it comes from the philanthropic budget. In other words, [LAUGH] they need it to be done, they need it to be seen to be done, but they don't want the cost of it to be reflected in their operations. There are absolutely extraordinary people in the corporate sector, such as Paul Polman of Unilever. You should talk to him on one of these because he speaks much better than I do and with all the authority of surviving in the hard world of the corporate world. >> [LAUGH] >> But he speaks so well about stewardship, yeah. So do you see these as kind of spin-off intellectual developments that sort of drew on your idea, or have they helped to give your idea in its wider application more credibility, do you think, in policy circles or political circles? >> Yes, since they took it seriously. But then I'm completely aware that the surge in interest was because people in universities, and people in the accounting world, and people in the corporate world, and the people in the government world, if you can't put numbers to things. And so Aaron's contribution is absolutely essential. What I then discovered, there was a tension between, not the purity of the virtual water idea, but the sort of simplicity of it and the disproportion of explanation that came from that compared with the mistakes that get made when you try to put metrics on it. Because the big and important thing to remember is that impact is more important than volume. So that you can have a high volume of water going into a commodity which then goes across the world but it doesn't really matter. And there may be environment impact costs which should be taken into account. So it is, in fact, impact that counts whether that's incorporation of the input and the damage done in using it causes an expense which should be reflected in the price. And therefore, if it was, that would be one way of getting the customer to realize. Or in some sort of labeling way, which hasn't proved to be a very successful way of doing it, partly because impact is harder to labelize [LAUGH] than volume. >> So the numbers are more kind of relative to context than they appear than on the surface? >> Mm-hm, yeah, yeah. >> Okay.